The primary aim of the large corporations that promote “social media” is that there be nothing we can be against. To that end, they constantly foster the proliferation of strategic plays of liberties and personal initiatives based on participatory logic and pleasurable flows of communicative social activity. Consequently, there is an almost inevitable acquiescence to the economic interests the entire system rests on, given that they are based on the most inalienable aspects of life: interpersonal communication, friendship, contact among people, feeling close to others, etc.
However, resistance to the fascination exerted by “social media” involves first and foremost a political analysis of their operating dynamics, limitations and exclusions. For “to resist” is to reflect critically on the processes of inclusion of the individual in the new network economy and his or her adaptation to it, demonstrating the strategies and effects that characterize the process as corporative interests colonize the forms of human interrelations. And the top priority of new forms of resistance must be an attempt to rescue – although in a merely anecdotal or symbolic way – the principles that currently comprise the foundations of online economic production, which are communication, affection, cooperation, friendship, company, etc., from the control of business.
However, resistance to the fascination exerted by “social media” involves first and foremost a political analysis of their operating dynamics, limitations and exclusions. For “to resist” is to reflect critically on the processes of inclusion of the individual in the new network economy and his or her adaptation to it, demonstrating the strategies and effects that characterize the process as corporative interests colonize the forms of human interrelations. And the top priority of new forms of resistance must be an attempt to rescue – although in a merely anecdotal or symbolic way – the principles that currently comprise the foundations of online economic production, which are communication, affection, cooperation, friendship, company, etc., from the control of business.
Would this be an argument for, or against, Dreamwidth as a commercial endeavor?
What might a "resistance to the fascination exerted by 'social media'” look like on, or through, or from within Dreamwidth?
In an interview with we make money not art, "Tag ties and affective spies" curator Daphne Dragona links the concepts of "[e]xposure, affection, and a kind of surveillance" with reference to Twitter. Does Dreamwidth's splitting of LJ's 'friend' function into 'subscribe' and 'grant access' unbundle these concepts, or simply multiply and disperse their points of intersection in new ways?
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chasethestars
chasethestars
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of course, it's capitalism, but it's, as the OTW has said as a rallying cry, ONE OF US owning the servers, and us using our own money to support it, while allowing people who can't pay to be subsidized by the users who can. Making the best of a capitalistic approach, as it were.
All you have to do is contrast it with FanLib.com to see the difference.
Can't speak to the Twitter comparison; I have no clue about Twitter.
To me, that's certainly preferable to relying on ad-supported services, but there's still a difference between a for-profit corporate service like Dreamwidth and a non-profit like OTW (or other possible structures such as co-operatives or collectives).
I don't know yet what it will mean, compared to LJ (or Facebook, or FanLib, or YouTube), to have "ONE OF US owning the servers." 'One of us' isn't, and can't be, the same as 'we', no matter who it is -- though if it has to be one of us instead of all of us,
Personally, I'm more concerned in general with having control over my data, my posts, my online identity, and my connections to & interactions with my social network. I don't want to own the server -- that's a lot of upkeep, and I already have my hands full with my cat!
But Dreamwidth is also open source software, so -- if I did have my own server -- I could host my own installation, and make it non-profit, or a co-op, or a collective, or, I don't know, a new net-based religion if I wanted to. That, to me, is the strongest argument for Dreamwidth in the context of the social media critique in "Forms of Resistance."
I'm more concerned in general with having control over my data, my posts, my online identity, and my connections to & interactions with my social network
Anent this, I've been alternately frustrated and sort of sadly amused that The Archive Of Our Own [sic] won't allow me to decide as a writer how I'd like my entry to present in terms of... almost anything. I don't get to choose what tags are displayed with the "people" entry that links to my page, nor even the order of the site-enforced selection of tags; nor can I control the order in which my stories are listed on my own story page (again, beyond the site-enforced selection of alphabetical, etc.).
Hell, I can't even get the characters in a single story listed in the order I want them to display in. Bobby Singer gets first billing in a story that's actually a Missouri Moseley piece. That's an improvement, I suppose, over the iteration in which Sam Winchester got moved to the front just because he appears in the story, though it's not about him.
So yeah. I should probably write up my own post about this instead of bitching about it in your LJ.
Then again, I'm not the target audience for the archive. I read pretty narrowly (call it risk aversion) based on recs & authors, so I'm generally not interested in browsing by fandom or pairing or warning or trope. In other words, I wouldn't use tags for discovery or filtering, and it seems like the tag structure and culture is designed with those uses in mind.
I love the phrase "[e]xposure, affection, and a kind of surveillance". I don't do Twitter, but I have a lot of friends who do Facebook, and I think one thing that turns me off about it is the idea of trying that hard to package your life to sound interesting. It just blurs the line between relationships and entertainment in a way that I'm not comfortable with. But I don't know why I feel like DW/LJ is different, just because I don't know you guys in RL.
Edited 2009-04-22 03:56 am (UTC)
That's a great way of putting it. Aside from all the formal economics of advertising, paid accounts, internet access, etc., we all participate in a sort of social economy where the currency is stuff like attention, reputation, links, feedback, connection, etc. Even if I'm not trying to get "rich" on these things but just get my basic needs met, I'm opting in to that economy when I join a social media site.
What I really liked about that phrase that you quote is how things like friending & subscribing & granting access can simultaneously represent exposure, affection, and surveillance in ways that aren't easily disentangled.